Ralf Nolden, our friend and colleague, brought us the news late last week that two major products of the KDE project won Linux New Media awards at the "Systeme" fair in München. Konqueror, the versatile KDE web browser, file manager and document viewer, won the award for "Best client-side Open Source Software". KDevelop, the outstanding integrated development environment (of which Ralf is a principal developer), merited the "Best development tool" award. Details about these and other awards can be found at linux-community.de. Congratulations to all the members of our community who make these successes possible through their relentless work on code, graphics, translations, testing and all the other components of our project.

Best would be to write a good KDE gui for mplayer, it is
the best video player out there (Although the developers are
a little difficult sometimes, they do not like gcc 2.96, ICEWM,
sawfish, KDE and users who don't RTFM)

But aviplay only supports AVI/ASF/WMV(7)s... MPlayer also supports MPEG1/2s, WMV8 and playing directly from encrypted DVDs. And it is more optimized... And rumours say that they are also planning on support for RealVideo and QuickTime movies...

Well, this being Open Source, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can just re-integrate any given codec as an aRts library, and then it should run (theoretically :-) in any app using KParts, including Konqi and KPresenter. Of course, (in KPresenter for example) doing things like making sure movies play at the right time in presentations, grabbing the first and last frame and using them for in and out effects, etc etc, would require special coding, but once that is done, you could swap out the backend for another fairly easily.

mplayer simply ROCKS! It's too bad the gui is gtk, cuz I didn't install those libs and I'm not planning to because gmplayer needs them.. I currently merged mplayer in my filetypes thingie and it's heaven! real player and quicktime support would make it even more powerfull then m$ mplayer, quicktime and realplayer in one!! (really curious about that rumour :P) and last but not least, it even works with arts thru sdl! Maybe it's possible to write a noatun plugin?

ZZplayer Does use Smpeg and SDL nicely but the Author Nicolas Vignal did not tried to port this to KDE 2.2 and above. I wonder why. it's a nice app. I wish any kde developer with average or above kde coding skill can port it. I just don't know how to code KDE :(

...big loss, surely...
But I am confident others will pick up where he left off.
Anyway, with Mosfet's up-and-down attitude, maybe he'll get bored of his new Windows XP machine and return to KDE... *grin*

I don't intend to diminish his contributions to KDE, but Mosfet is only one of many persons contributing to KDE. In fact there are probably many coders with more importance.

And what generally seems even more important to the KDE development is good teamwork. I think much of the success and development speed of KDE is due to the fact that the hackers work together as a team and not as jealous individuals.

Insofar it's sad that Mosfet decided to leave Linux altogether, as he is surely talented, but he is certainly not undispensable.

Who picks up the Liquid theme ;) ? BTW, is this possible with the current license?

It doesn't seem to be anything other than a rumor, though. There's no link, and from the discussion that went on in the kde list, it sure doesn't sound like he had any plans to do so.

If anyone else had ported it to kde3, it still needs to be distributed as patches to liquid-0.6 (because of the QPL) or you would have to re-implement based on the liquid-0.1 code (which was released as BSD).

Would it be posible to fix the jumps with the X system? I mean: When you set the default login as a X login (KDM for example), firts, it appears the console login. Then it shows a X jump to a gray X background, later the kdm background and after it (if you have set a image background, there is another jump between the color background and the image), the kdm login manager. and I think it is not very elegant. would it be posible to fix this jumps?

This is fairly simple to fix. There is no easy way to handle the very first one, so we can ignore it. Caldera and Mandrake have both built a system that makes 2 and 3 look identical for the most part. 4 is just a matter of KDM loading it's background first thing, and using a background close or identical (though in higher res of course) to the 2 and 3 backgrounds. After that, it should switch to the user's custom background, meaning a jump only 3 times. Mostly just a matter of installing Mandrake or Caldera's (perhaps other?) custom tools, using a matching kdm background, and moving a couple xsets to the very beginning of scripts.

'kdmdesktop' is the program that loads the kdm background. Unfortunately, like all KDE apps, it takes a day and a half to startup. Maybe the kdm background loader could be the nice job of a non-KDE/Qt app.

I believe there is a way to tell X what to use as the initial background (like instead of that gray checkered thing). You could just make it a nice shade of blue instead. Then a fraction of a second later the background should load.

This is from the startkde script (which is executed by kdm to start KDE):

# Set the background to plain grey.
# The standard X background is nasty, causing moire effects and exploding
# people's heads. We use colours from the standard KDE palette for those with
# palettised displays.

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr -solid '#C0C0C0'

So all you have to do is change the grey color to the color of the kdm background or the color of the user's background. If you use an image as background then using the -bitmap option instead of the -solid option should help. Unfortunately xsetroot can't set a gradient background.

Quick question. Is the toolbar used in Konq, KMail and other KDE apps a QT widget or a KDE widget? It is exhibiting strange behaviour (maybe it is implemented this way), when you resize the app. For instance, the toolbar bands jump from one line to another (wrap). Is it possible to lock the toolbars that they don't wrap around, sort of like IE or MS Office.

....and a few others PLUS ALL Xanim codecs as well (ie you can play quicktime, 3ivx's etc with mplayer)

mplayer can make use of X11/SDL/GL/XV for video output rendering, and ie with xv I can play divx's very good in full screen with my PII 300 thanx to my TNT2 (mplayer supports YV12 for pixel rendering, making extensive use of TNT2)

PLEASE consider this an alternativ, even though it hasn't been started as a "K" project!